So, they have been more or less continuously decontaminating water leaking out of the cores since Sunday - it's Tuesday 4:37 am as I write this; yes I am one o' them early birds. If they can keep this up they can stay ahead of the very real possibility of an overflow of said water directly into the ocean and groundwater. On Monday, they halted actually pumping that decontaminated water back into the cores b/c of leaks, but this would seem like a minor problem compared to what they have come up against before and will be resolved quickly I think.

Meanwhile, when 16 residents living just outside the exclusion zone aged 4 to 77 years had their urine tested, all showed some body contamination, some already several milliseiverts, when by international standards, the human body exposure rate is 1 millsievert a year. Still no cause for alarm though they say, of course. People in these areas have been asked to evacuate within a month when they have the means, but it is voluntary.

In this first test on May 5, all of these residents had cesium and iodine in their systems. In a test taken in late May (all late info I know but apparently it takes time to crunch all the numbers) none showed iodine contamination, which would lead me to believe that iodine is no longer being actively emitted by the cores, and that they are no longer making any kind of reaction.

Rad levels in the air around Tokyo have, as I reported before, plateaued in the .0580 microsievert per hour range, 50-60 percent higher than pre-disaster readings. I would assume this is largely from cesium still left in the environment, most of which has settled. Again these numbers are safe according to even more skeptical experts who know their stuff. Still have to watch the food, and it will continue to be monitored for...lifetimes? Not sure. It will work it's way higher in the food chain, just as it did in the old place name cum nuke holocaust moniker, Chernobyl.

Will there be a Fukushima in East Palookaville or even West Palookaville, the media outlets ask? My still quite local concern at this point is that my son can go see his grandparents in western Fukushima, (or is it western Nukewasteland?) before they get any older. Not in the cards right now. I should and do count my family lucky though.

So, as of Saturday night, for the first time, TEPCO is now cooling what remains of the cores entirely with recycled water that is being pumped out of the contaminated leaked water under the reactors. Once they get a little more ahead of the cycle, they can also start increasing the amount of water running over the cores to cool them down even further. Before they had to limit the amount of water they were using because it was threatening to overflow.

The spent fuel rod pools next to all the reactors except for number 4 are now all being consistently cooled to temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius which means no more steam off of them to put more relatively minute amounts of radiation in the air. No. 4 spent rods pool is still in the 80 degree range and still steaming, while also being the most precarious situation left at the plant and the one most difficult to stabilize because of the hydrogen explosion in March that incapacitated it.

For the first time since May 2nd, a trace amount of cesium has shown up in Tokyo drinking water again. We shall see what the numbers for tomorrow are.

There is talk about months to a year from now being worse in some ways as the cesium sets into the soil. It has become clear that asphalt registers noticeably lower radiation than soil or vegetation, probably because it easily washes off in the rain - first time I have ever thanked Tokyo for it's endless asphalt. ( :

Again, no more signs of Iodine, which means the reactors are no longer "reacting".

No need to comment. I just hope the "views" go up one or two and that a few people bother to read to the end. Again, it is my therapy.

"If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-line, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans? Maybe he’s not the problem."

It has been pointed out in news, websites etc. that you can get radiation numbers like Tokyo and it's surrounding area in a number of places around the world. Europe for example has a number of areas that are higher. What I have trouble pinning down is what particles are causing the higher radiation levels - this makes a big difference. Some areas have natural higher radiation, not caused by more dangerous particles such as cesium. Are these numbers in Europe largely after effects of Chernobyl, which spewed radioactive material 15,000 feet in the air? I don't know.

Anyway, back to here, as you may have heard, there are "hot spots" in Japan that are relatively far from the "radius", just as they were in areas surrounding Chernobyl (the hottest and most severe of them being largely in poor neighboring Belarus. One hotter spot, considering it's distance from Daiichi, is the area I travel to work (as I have "reported" before). The thinking now is these hot spots were generally created during a heavy rainfall around the 21st and 22nd of March. Wherever your area was in reference to the fabled "plume" and the rain at that time will seem to have affected your area for some time into the future. Again these numbers are still low compared to reading just outside the radius, but anyway..

I decided to take a look at rainfall radiation readings on those dates and they do give one pause:

The site is in Japanese, but you can make out the dates. ND means "not detected" which can also mean inside the margin of error. Scroll down to the dates from around March 21st to 24th or so. Scary numbers. The far left column is radioactive iodine, the two to the right are two kinds of cesium. Check out number for surrounding dates to get a gauge of just how much the numbers spiked on these days:

Ironically, on a personal note, I also happened to notice that these dates closely correspond to the days that I took my family to far away Kyoto because I couldn't take the stress anymore. We came back the night of the worst rain radioactivity for iodine, which was 3/22. Seems we missed the bulk of that. I have no idea if being out of Tokyo for most of that time made any difference, but I am sure it couldn't have made things worse.

Believe it or not I still do manage to get some work done through all of this "info overload" and I have to go to work.

In the last interval, even I have a little trouble finding news (though admittedly I have grown lazy about finding more news in Japanese, which was my primary source in the fire few weeks).

I suppose no news is good news, and means things are progressing as planned in Daiichi. Or as Reboot succinctly put it: No possible immediate calamity, no news. 2 out of 3 reactors have been continuously receiving nitrogen injections to mitigate any future risks of hydrogen explosions (a risk which is already quite low due to the greatly reduced temperature of the cores and the lack of pressure in the containment) now only no. 3 waits to be hooked up to nitrogen injection, but this is a mere extra precaution as I stated above. Have heard nothing about the spent fuel rod pool next to dormant reactor no. 4. I would assume little progress, but no deterioration in the situation. As I have said, it is the one to watch for any scary new scenarios right now (yes indeed, I knocked on wood just now).

What news there is has understandably focused on radiation and concerns about it. More people are getting tested in the surrounding areas and 45% of kids showed some internal contamination. The highest being in a 1 year old.. The line is still that their cancer risks have only been raised microscopically. Most of the benchmarks for future risk were set from studies of those irradiated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But they knew a lot less than they know now, and those numbers are largely estimates based on how far people were when the bombs hit. Most irradiated food consumption data comes from Chernobyl and surrounding areas. The numbers that are showing up in rad testing look, shall we say, manageable.

Not absolutely every food can be tested, because the resources aren't there. On a personal note, my wife and I's primary concern is our son's school lunch. I proposed opting out, but that simply isn't done in Japan unless you are allergic to everything under the sun. I said let's opt out anyway, and send him to school with a packed lunch. My son said he would rather swallow razor blades than do that. Conformity is expected here to an almost amazing degree (Japan has been called by some, my wife among them, as the perfect communist country, hiding in the guise of democratic country). Anyway, the numbers for food do not look all that scary compared to what people in the poor, rural regions around Chernobyl consumed unabated after the crisis there. And we, as I have said, have procured a supply of vegetables etc. from much further south and are confident it is completely safe.

The gov't as of last Friday, put large scale power using companies on alert that they had to cut power by 15 percent every day or pay huge fines, because we came desperately near the 97% capacity threshold several times in the last few weeks. 97% is the threshold at which brownouts will start to happen. The percentage of power usage is something on display in many places. There are two public screens I can see on my way to work that prominently display the current percentage, and most popular web ports for PCs and cell phones all have the current percentage displayed (I tried to use google translate, but that particular area gets ignored for whatever reason, just look to the smack-dab center of the screen and you'll see a percentage (which right now is 62% as it's still early, 5:30 am).

Well, a few experts who knew more than a lot of the blowhards out there were concerned about what could happen to spent fuel rods in in an already structurally compromised containment vessel next to reactor number 4. They were concerned that if an earthquake and/or aftershock that was a 7 or higher came it could have dire consequences for the plant and northern Japan. Well, a 7.3 came and went and all seems clear at the power plant. No additional damage reported there and no rise in radiation levels (checked 'em myself just to be sure, online of course). Also nothing but a barely perceptible ensuing "tsunami", and police and fire departments report no additional damage from the quake in northeastern Japan. Good news. There's no news like good news like no news I know.

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